Thanks, ExifTool (Flickr export/iCloud Photos import solution)

[brendn]

I had no awareness of ExifTool before last night, when a lucky search brought me here and saved me a lot of frustration. I don't know if this post from 2021 ended up helping its creator or not, but it helped me, so I thought I'd describe my use case in case someone else has a similar need.

I've always kept my "real photos" (taken with a DSLR) and my "phone pictures" separate, archiving the former on Flickr and the latter in my iCloud-backed Photos library. I still enjoy and use Flickr, but I've been wanting to integrate a copy of my "real photos" in with the rest of my digital images for things like text indexing, throwback widgets, and quick slideshows. So I requested an export of all my Flickr data and got a big archive file of a few thousand jpegs.

I thought I'd just be able to drag those into the Photos app on my Mac and have them assume their correct place in chronological order--I even checked to make sure that Flickr faithfully exported them back out with the correct dates in EXIF. But to my unhappy surprise, by default, the Photos app sorts by either file creation or (worse) file modification date in both the standard photo-roll view and the year-based view. And of course, since I'd just unzipped the archive, the files were "created" and "modified" in May of 2025, even for photos that were actually taken twenty years ago.

I wasn't thrilled about that, so I removed the photos I had imported already from the app and sat down to write some code that would set the file dates to match the EXIF ones. I know enough Python to get by, but I had little luck with my first few attempts. That's when I started looking for an example script and wound up on this forum instead.

As I'm sure regular denizens here have already gathered, once I'd installed ExifTool, the solution was quick and simple:

Code Select Expand

exiftool "-filecreatedate<datetimeoriginal" data-download-1
exiftool "-filemodifydate<datetimeoriginal" data-download-1

What a lifesaver. When I imported the processed jpegs into my library again, this time, they appeared in all the right places in my digital chronology. My gratitude to Phil and the community here for helping me. If you're a fellow stranger trying to import an archive of Flickr data into your iCloud Photos library, those commands may help you too.

[Phil Harvey]

Great.  I'm glad you found the solution.

For the sake of completeness, multiple tags may be copied in the same command.  For example:

exiftool "-filecreatedate<datetimeoriginal" "-filemodifydate<datetimeoriginal" DIR

- Phil